The Financier

A Philadelphia boy watches a lobster eat a squid in a tank and concludes that he now understands how the world is arranged. He goes into brokerage, into street railways, into the city treasurer's accounts, and into the wife of a man whose help he needs. Dreiser built Cowperwood on the real streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes and researched him like a reporter. The prose is heavy and the accounting is exact.